More importantly, the way that you are studying right now might not be the best for
you: How would you know? Easy: If your grades aren't what you'd like
them to be, then you probably need to change how you study!

One important clarification before we begin:

"Studying" is not the same thing as "doing homework"!

Studying may include doing homework, but it is also a lot more,
as you will see. (So, if you say that you have no homework and that therefore
you can't, or you don't have to, study, you're mistaken!)

I am going to give you some suggestions on how to study efficiently. They
worked for me when I was in high school, college, and graduate school.
Not only that, but they worked equally well for me in humanities courses
(like philosophy and literature) and in science courses (like math and
computer science).

But, to the extent that everyone's learning style may
be different, some of my suggestions may not work for you, at least not
without some individual modifications. Nevertheless, I urge you to
try them. Most successful students use them (or some slight
variation of them).

Please feel free to
send me
suggestions for studying that worked for you. I will try to include
them in further versions of this guide.

If you have a "real" job after school
that you do just for fun (or for some extra spending money), or if
you participate in extra-curricular activities (whether
school-related or not), keep your priorities
in mind:

Your education should come first!

If you must work (in
order to make ends meet), you should realize the limitations that
this imposes on your study time.

How much time should you devote to studying? A recent
survey
in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggested that students
are not studying enough. So, how much is enough? If you assume that
your education is a full-time job, then you should spend about 40
hours/week on it. Figure that 1 academic credit equals about 1
hour. So, if you're taking 15 credits, then you're spending about 15
hours in class. Subtracting that from 40 gives you 25 hours that you
should be spending studying at home (or in the library).

You should spread that out over the week. Suppose you decide to study
Sunday through Thursday evenings, taking Fridays and Saturdays off (from
studying, that is). Dividing that 25 hours by those 5 days gives you 5
hours of studying per night. If you think that's too much, then plan on
studying in the afternoons, too, or some of Saturday.

The above are just rules of thumb. If you're taking a 3-credit
independent-study course, but you meet with your instructor only 1 hour/week,
then you should add the extra 2 hours to your at-home study time. If
you're working to earn some money, you should subtract your work hours
from your free time, not from your study time! (If you don't
want to do that, then you should consider quitting your job or reducing
your course load.)

So, for instance, if you are a part-time student taking (say) 3 courses
worth a total of 9 credits
and working (say) 20 hours per week, then you have 20 hours per week for
your coursework (40 hours in a typical work-week minus 20 hours at your
job). The 9 credits amount to approximately 9 hours in class. So,
20 – 9 = 11 hours to spend at home studying.
That works out to about 2.2 hours (2 hours and 12 minutes, to be overly
precise) per day (in a 5-day week, using the assumption about no
studying on Fridays or Saturdays),
or about 0.7 hours (42 minutes) per course for 3
courses.

If that still seems like a lot, consider the difference between
high-school courses and college courses. The typical high-school course
meets every day, for about 5 hours/week. But the typical college course
meets only about 3 hours/week, yet is supposed to be more intensive than
its high-school counterpart. That's because in college you're expected
to put more of your own time into studying.

Moreover, notes are often incomplete or sketchy; just reading
such notes won't help. And a few days or months after you take them, they
may very well be illegible or incomprehensible.
Finally, if you don't do something active with your notes, you run the
risks of having unorganized notes or of misplacing them.

What I suggest is that you study your notes by re-writing them.
For each class, buy a separate notebook from the one you take your notes in.
I recommend a "composition" or spiral notebook, not a looseleaf
notebook, for your "permanent" (i.e., re-written) notes. Then, as soon as
possible after class (preferably that evening or the next), copy your
notes into your permanent notebook.

The main idea behind re-writing your "raw" class notes (besides making
them more legible and organized) is that the very act of copying them is
one of the best ways of studying them! Further study of your class notes
can then be done from these "cooked" ones that are neater, more legible,
more organized, and more complete. I will suggest ways to do this later.

Use this opportunity to fill in gaps
from your memory while they are still fresh in mind. You may find that
you have questions, perhaps something you missed or don't understand, or
even a "substantive" question. If so, good! Make a note of your
question and ask it in class next time!

Use this opportunity to
(re-)organize your notes in a more logical or coherent fashion. You could
write your permanent notes in an outline form if that seems suitable: You
don't have to follow any "official" or formal outlining style (e.g.,
using the I.A.1.(a)(i) format or the (sometimes silly) rule that there
must always be at least two subsections, never just one)after all,
these are your notes. Personally, I like to number main ideas (and
separate them with a line), using
an "indented bullet" style for details:

Also, typing class
notes into a computer file can be inconsistent with my recommendation to
re-write your class notes.
Rewriting on a computer might have some advantages in terms of keeping
track of your notes or, especially, searching them.
And, of course, you can edit your computer
file later, but editing is not the same as copying,
and I am recommending
copying as a means to studying (for one thing, it forces you to (re-)read
all your notes). Of course, you can copy your raw notes into a
neater computer file; this may be a matter of taste, but I find that I
have a firmer grasp of what I write if I handwrite it than if I type it.
(As Usama Fayyad has said:
computers are "great at bookkeeping
but not yet great at recording impromptu
ideas, thoughts, feelings. For that, paper
is still far superior. You can hold it, fold
it, put it in your pocket, look at it again
later when it's convenient" (as quoted in
Swerdlow 1999: 130).)
Moreover, the main use of your notes should be for summarizing them to
make
a study guide for exams.
In that case, handwritten notes would serve as well as online ones,
especially if you're tempted to create the summary merely by cutting and
pasting your computer file rather than by rewriting.

Worse, you may be tempted to use the computer that you're ostensibly
taking notes on to surf the Internet, look at email, or chat with
friends. Don't! (For an interesting debate on this topic, see
Adams 2006.)

For that matter, turn off your computer in class. And your iPod. And
your cell phone. And your pager. And anything else that might distract
you. For reasons why, see:

When should you study or do your homework? It's tempting to put
off your homework to the last minute.
There are at least two good reasons to do your homework as soon
as possible and not put it off till the evening, when it's not daylight
(although you should certainly take a break between the end
of the school day and before starting your homework):

It's better to get it done and over with, and to leave yourself
enough time to do it all. If you put it off, you may find that you
have an assignment or two that are going to take you a lot longer than
you thought they would. If you start early and get your work done
before you relax, you'll have enough time for even those hard
assignments
(even if it means not having enough time to Facebook or play videogames
or read for fun). The general principle is:
Don't eat your dessert first!

You're more awake during the daytime or after relaxing for, say,
an hour or so after classes end, than you will be at the end of the day
just before going to sleep.

If you read without thinking, I guarantee that
your mind will eventually wander off, your eyes will eventually glaze
over, and you will fall asleepit's a form of self-hypnosis.
So you must read actively. To use computer jargon, you must turn the
inert medium of text on paper to an interactive medium, in which you have
a "conversation" with the text, as you might if you could be talking to
the author.

The first step in reading actively is to read s-l-o-w-l-y. Here is
an algorithm (i.e., a procedure) for
how to read any text, in any subject, slowly and actively:

WHILE there is a next sentence to read, DO:
BEGIN { while }
Read it, SLOWLY;
IF you do not understand it, THEN
BEGIN { if }
re-read the previous material, SLOWLY;
re-read the incomprehensible sentence, SLOWLY;
IF you still don't understand it, THEN
ask a fellow student to explain it;
IF you still don't understand it, THEN
ask your Teaching Assistant (TA) to explain it;
IF you still don't understand it, THEN
ask me;
IF you are in an upper-level course & you still don't understand it, THEN
write a paper about it (!)
END { if }
END; { while }

Since there is no next sentence (because the Boolean test in the
WHILE is false), you've understood the text!

For those of you who may not be familiar with how to read structured
computer programs such as this one, here's how it goes:
In a "while" statement, if the initial test is false, then the rest of
the statement is not executed.
So, if you are at the beginning or the middle of reading a text, there
will be a "next" sentence, so you do execute the rest of the
statement, which says to read that next sentence slowly, etc.
However, if you have finished reading the entire text (and, hopefully,
have now understood it), then there is no next sentence, so you are
finished! (The words in braces, like "{ while }",
are just computer-programming notation for a comment that is intended
for human readers of a computer program but that is ignored by the
computer.)

This algorithm has three major advantages:

It forces you to actively think about each sentence you read
before you go on to read the next one.

It slows you down,
so that you don't read past the point at which you don't understand.
This is especially important in mathematical and scientific subjects.

It can help you get help from your teacher, because you can show your
teacher exactly where you got lost. It is always much better to show
your teacher exactly what it is that you don't understand than
it is to
just say that you don't understand the material.

Note that it also provides you an opportunity to interact with your
instructors and fellow students!

How do you know whether you understand what you've read? Easy: After
each sentence, ask
yourself "Why?" (Pressley & El-Dinary 1992).

A slightly less messy, but equally useless, technique is to use a pen or
pencil to underline important or interesting passages. I guarantee
that you will wind up underlining every sentence on every page, and you
will have gained nothing.

The technique that I suggest is also susceptible to this problem, but has
a built-in way to overcome it, so that you can
re-read the text, highlighting different passages each
time. The trick is to highlight a passage by drawing a vertical
line in the margin. I like to use the right margin and to make my
line a right square bracket: ]. If you want to make it
clear [exactly
where the highlighted passage begins or ends,] you can use small square
brackets in the text,
as I did in this sentence,
along with the vertical line in the margin.
This way, even if you've
slipped into the error of highlighting (i.e., vertical-lining)
every sentence on every page, at
least you haven't ruined the page. Moreover, when you re-read the text
(note that I said 'when', not 'if' :-), you can then use a different
highlighting technique (e.g., underlining) to highlight more important
passages. Sometimes, I use double brackets in the margin for this second
round of highlighting: ]]
and underlining for a third round. (If you must, you could use yellow
highlighter for a fourth round.)

Earlier, I said that there was an exception to this
method of slow and active reading. If the text is a work of literature (a
story, novel, play, poem, etc.), it is often best to read it once all the
way through without stopping, just as you would read something for fun,
so that you get to know what it's about and can appreciate it
as a work of literature. (If there's a recording of it, you might find it
helpful to listen to the recording while reading the text; I have
found this especially useful for Shakespeare.)
Then you can use the slow
and active reading techniques for a second (or third, or fourth, or
...) reading when you are studying the text.

Actually, even for non-fiction, it can be useful to read the text
through once, quickly, to get an overview, perhaps making notes if
something strikes you, and then doing the slow and active reading
techniques when you are studying the text.

What about film or video versions? They can be helpful but, in general,
of course are no substitute for reading. The exception here is for plays,
which are intended to be seen, not (just) read. If you do decide to watch
in addition to read, which should you do first? I prefer watching first,
reading afterwards. I have almost always been disappointed by film
adaptations of favorite texts (because they don't match the mental images
that I construct when I read), but I have almost never been disappointed
by a text after watching a film adaptation. Besides, if you watch first
and read later, the adaptation can help you visualize what you're
reading.

It should go without saying that you should do your homework and do it on
time.

Science and math courses (and some others, such as foreign-language
courses) often require you to do homework exercises or problem sets. I
strongly recommend that you do not simply do the problems and hand
them in. Rather, do them on scrap paper, check them over, and then
copy them neatly. Turn in the neat copy (and, of course, be sure
that your name is on it!).
You may
even want to duplicate your work in case the teacher loses it (unlikely)
or doesn't give it back in time to use it for studying for an exam (this
should only happen in rare circumstances, usually just before an exam
(when the teacher has a lot of things to do),
but it is not unheard of).

And don't just write down answers. Write down the problem and the
complete solution showing how you arrived at your answer.

Earlier, I discussed managing your time. When
you have exams, time management becomes even more crucial.

Begin studying about 1 week before the exam. Spend at least an hour each
night (or day) studying for the exam in the manner described below. Try to
spend the entire night (and/or day) before the exam studying for it. Of
course, if you have two exams on the same day, you'll have to split the
time in half.

For final exams, try to spend as much time as possible studying. Do not
be tempted, by any free time that you have during exam week, to do anything
other than studying. (If you must take some time to relax, do it
after you've done all your studying for the day.) If you have
E exams and D days to study for them, spend roughly
D/E days studying for each exam. (E.g., if you have 4 exams
and 5 days to study for them, spend a little more than 1 day (1.25 days to
be exact) studying for each exam.)

If you have some free days, then some exams, then some more free days,
then some more exams, etc., plan your studying so that you'll spend
approximately the same amount of time studying for each exam, making sure
that the night (or day) just before an exam is spent studying for it.
E.g., suppose you have 2 free days to study before exam #1, then one more
free day before exams #2 and #3.
Think of each day as having 3 parts: morning, afternoon, and evening.
Let's assume that each exam is in only one of these parts (i.e., it's not
so long that it extends through 2 of them). Then you might divide your
studying time as shown in the chart. Note that you
should not delay studying for exam #3 until after exam #2; start
studying for all exams right away.

Most students don't realize this, because they have an "illusion of
competence" (that is, you think you know the material better than you
really do) when they re-read notes and textbooks
(Karpicke et al. 2009;
Belluck 2011),
especially when
re-reading passively instead of
actively.

One method of studying that is better than passive re-reading is the
"read-recite-review" ("3R") method: "Read the text, set the text aside
and recite out loud all that [you can] remember, and then read the text
a second time" (McDaniel et al. 2009).

More importantly,
you learn better and remember more from repeated testing
(from both in-class quizzes and from self-testing at home)
than from repeated reading (Karpicke et al. 2009).
(So when your instructor gives you lots
of quizzes or tells you to memorize basic facts, don't complain! That's
the best way to learn and to remember what you learn.)

For subjects in which you will have to solve problems or write proofs,
solve lots of sample problems from your text or from other texts
(
Schaum's Outline Series
(McGraw-Hill)
books are usually quite good in this regard).
How will you know if your answers are correct? The best way is to form a
study group of 2 or more fellow students: Solve the same problems and
compare answers. If your answers agree, they're probably correct; if not,
go to your Teaching Assistant (TA) or teacher. As with slow reading,
it's always better when asking for help from a teacher to have a specific
problem or question to ask.

Then memorize the questions and answersbut do not
simply recite them by heart. Instead, write down the answers:
Cover the right-hand side (the answers) with a blank sheet of paper, and
write down the answers. When you finish a page, check your work
and repeat writing the answers to the questions you missed
until you get them all correct.

Why
write, and not merely recite? Because you will have to write the
answers on the actual test; get used to writing them now. (Of course, if
it's going to be an oral exam, reciting may be better than writing. Still,
one tends to skip details when reciting, especially if you recite
silently to yourself, but if you write the answers and
have a good memory, then, during an oral exam, you can "read" the
answers with your mind's eye.)

For an essay question, do a "mind dump": Write down, on
scrap paper, brief reminders (keywords) of everything that you remember
about the topic of the question. Then
develop an outline of your answer.
Then write the essay. (With luck, much of the essay can be "copied from
memory" from the sample essays you wrote when studying.)

For an exam with problems to solve or proofs to write, do the easy ones
first.

Once you've got your outline, start writing, using your outline and notes
as a guide. Don't spend too much time editing what you write at this
stage. Just write. (I should note that some people prefer
"free writing"
, in which you don't spend any time preparing an outline
before you write. If that works for you, go for it.)

By the way, it's always helpful for keeping track of where
you are in your outline, both to you as writer and
to your reader, to give each section and subsection a name, as I have done
in this document.

Right about now, you're probably asking yourself whether you really
have to do all of this. It seems like an awful lot of work.

Well, of
course, you don't have to do all of it at once. Try various of these
suggestions to see what works for you. Try some variations that may better
fit your learning style or personal circumstances. But, in the long run,
there's no quick and easy road to studying. It is hard work and
should take a lot of time.

So, do you really have to do all
of this? Yes (or things very much like them)if you want to
really learn the material (and get good grades).

Finally, for what it's worth, here are some comments from students and
others who
have tried some of these methods:

"... this is the way you taught me to study years ago and it finally
paid off last year!" (a college sophomore who went from high-school
grades in the 70s to a 3.00 average in college)

"Thank you for the guide. It has some great tips! I'm surprised that I
use some of the techniques myself. (E.g., I abbrev. and cndnse my
notes.) I have one
suggestion, though: when reviewing for a test/exam, only study what you
aren't
familiar with. It reduces studying time and is helpful if you're a last
minute
person like me. :) Well, that may not work for you, but who knows?"

"... encourage some study groups! Not 5 in a group, 'cause
that will be a crowd, but study environment is as important as studying
itself; change of environments is sometimes good to make you study
better.
Thank you for your helpful hints, and it does help me to notice some of
my
weaknesses in studying."

"I'd like to pass along a bit of technique that worked well for
me in just about all my courses. Thinking about the subject
matteroften catalyzed by discussion with othersbefore delving into
it was my key to success. After giving it some thought, I wrote out a
series of logical, fundamental questions which I sought to answer that
would clarify the subject matter. You know, make it perspicuous. I
read/listened/watched with those questions in mind, noting as well other
points an author/instructor was attempting to make. If my questions
(which were fundamental to a clear understanding) went unanswered, I
would seek the answers through other written, visual, or aural
materials. Visiting an instructor during office hours or asking the
question in class was often most helpful. Once I had the basics well in
mind, building on them was easy and fun. Studying and learning in this
way also helped me to prepare for exams. Clearly, if I could think of a
question, there was a good chance one writing an exam might think of it
too. The technique is not a panacea for all study-related problems;
however, it does set forth a system to build upon in an individualized way.
I also suggest a
visit to the children's section of the library when revisiting or
attempting to master the basics of certain things. Books written at
that level, though often oversimplified, present ideas and concepts in
a
clear and easily understandable form usually lacking in primers
written
for adults. There's no substitute for laying a good foundation on
which to build additional knowledge."  Marc L. Ames

"I would like to thank you for the effort made doing this guide....
But there is one thing I would like to suggest for ... future
"upgrades" of this
text: I think you have to mention that it is important to be in good
physical condition as well, I mean: sleep 8 hours a day, eat well, ....
What I would like to point is that, in my opinion, it would be good to tell
students that they have to be in their best condition to study/take an
exam/work."
Diego Fernández Fernández,
E.U.I.T.I.O student (Computer Engineering),
Oviedo (SPAIN).

"I would like to thank you very much for the "How to Study" document I
discovered on the net. It is very informative, and it will help me with
my day
to day activities. I only wish I had it while I was in high school!"
Joseph Di Lillo,
Team LeadSAP Service Desk.

"Thanks so much for the great study guide. I am a high school counselor,
and
we have been teaching a freshmen study skills class for two years....
Your ideas have really inspired me, and there are many
of
the same theories that we have been presenting, but in a new way! Thanks
for
the great tips!"
Trinity Walsh,
Guidance Counselor,
Elder High School, Cincinnati, OH.